CHAPTER ELEVEN
Code School
Finally, graduation day came. Our all-Navajo 297th Platoon finished with the highest honors of all the recruits at boot camp. We held ourselves tall and proud in the uniforms of privates for our graduation photograph.
I did not know what would happen next. In a few days I might be shipped off to the Pacific to fight the Japanese, as other Marines were already doing on the island of Guadalcanal. I’d been reading about their heroic deeds in the Chevron, the Marine Corps’ camp newspaper. Or I might be trained for some special duty here in the United States. There were only two things of which I was certain. The first was that I was now a real leatherneck. That, grandchildren, is another name for a Marine. It was a good nickname to remind us and everyone else that Marines have always been the toughest of all the armed forces who fight for America. The second thing of which I was certain was that I was now ready for anything.
Many years later, I know I was right about the first thing. We Navajo Marines were tough and determined, perhaps even more so than most of the non-Indian Marines who later served by our sides. Why was this so? It may have been because we remembered the suffering and courage of our grandfathers who fought as warriors to protect our land and our people. We were not just fighting for the United States. We were going into battle for our Navajo people, our families, and our sacred land.
However, as far as that second idea—that we Navajos were ready for anything—we were surely wrong about that. It is true that we Navajos gained a reputation for being especially tough in combat. When a Navajo was wounded in battle, he did not moan or cry out the way many of the other men around us did. He suffered in silence, waiting quietly for help to come to him. This was something we had learned from our elders. They had taught us that in battle you must never give away to the enemy either your weakness or your location. But even though we were prepared for pain, we were not ready for what happened to us next. We were about to enter eight weeks of the strangest training any Marine in World War Two had to go through. In fact, what they asked of us Navajos after we finished boot camp was so unusual and unexpected that many of us thought at first we were the victims of some kind of mean joke.
“297th. Pack your gear. You’re shipping out.”
That is what the sergeant barked into our barracks the day after our graduation photo was taken.
That was the last thing we had expected. It was Sunday. All of the non-Indian Marines who had been in boot camp with us were leaving on furloughs. They were laughing and joking with each other as they headed for the gate to see friends and family or just go into town and have fun. But not us Navajos.
Some of those lucky guys, like my friend Georgia Boy, waved to us as our bus roared through the gate. I smiled and waved back at him, but my smile was an uncertain one. Why were we sixty-seven Indians being sent out this way, to some destination no one would tell us about? Were we finally going to begin that important but secret task only we Navajos would accomplish? Or was this some kind of punishment?
Our trip wasn’t long at all. They took us to Camp Elliott, a little north of San Diego. We were checked into our new barracks without a word of explanation about what we were going to do there. I didn’t sleep well at all that night. At 7:00 the next morning, several non-coms, who were to be our escorts, arrived at our barracks. In military language, grandchildren, a “non-com” is a non-commissioned officer, anyone above the rank of a private, but no higher than a sergeant. We were lined up, put through roll call, and then marched off to breakfast. I could hardly eat and a lot of the other guys were just as nervous as I was, picking at their food. As soon as we had finished, we were rounded up again and quick-marched to a building with bars on all the windows and a strong door that our escorts unlocked and opened.
“Inside,” the escort sergeant barked.
“Ah, they are taking us to jail,” Henry Bahe whispered to me just before we went through the door.
He meant it as a joke, but I didn’t laugh. My heart was beating faster. What was happening?
As soon as we all were inside, the escort sergeant shut the barred door and locked it behind him, leaving the rest of the Marines who had escorted us outside on guard. Then he led us down a long hall to another locked door. It opened to a classroom, much like the ones I had sat in for endless hours at Indian boarding school. The blackboards, the rough wooden floor, the uncomfortable-looking chairs were almost exactly the same. Our escort—who had not set foot into the room—shut the door and once again I heard the sound of a lock clicking.
All that had happened to that point was strange, grandchildren, but it was not as strange as the words I then heard spoken to us from the front of the classroom.
“Be quiet. Be seated.”
All of us Navajos turned immediately to look. Those words had been spoken in our native language! There, at the front of the class stood two Navajo men wearing the uniforms of Marines. One of them I recognized at once. It was Johnny Manuelito.
“This is Corporal Johnny Manuelito. I am Corporal John Benally,” said the second Navajo man who stood in front of us, speaking in English. “We will be your instructors.”
I was stunned. The idea of a Navajo being a teacher was new to me. Yes, grandchildren, I know that many of your teachers are Navajos now. But it was different back then.
Johnny Manuelito and John Benally passed out pencils and blank sheets of paper and then went to the front of the room by the blackboards. I was so amazed by all that was happening that I do not recall being handed a pencil and paper, but somehow I found them in my hands.
“Follow our instructions exactly,” Johnny Manuelito said. “We will speak words in Navajo. You must write down those same words on your paper in English.” He turned toward John Benally, who held a piece of chalk in one hand and an eraser in the other.
“Wóláchíí’,” Johnny Manuelito said. I looked up in surprise as he said it, then realized he was not looking my way and using my nickname. He was just speaking the word for ant.
In large block letters, John Benally printed the word ANT on the blackboard. As soon as everyone had seen it, he erased it.
“Now it is your turn,” Johnny Manuelito said. “We speak in Navajo. You write in English, just as Corporal Benally just did. Be sure to print in block letters.” He paused, looked out at all of us, then nodded.
“Wóláchíí’,” he said.
“Shash,” said John Benally.
“Mósí.”
“.”
“Dzeh.”
“Ma’ii.”
ANT, BEAR, CAT, DEER, ELK, FOX. I put those words down on the paper. But they were speaking so fast that I missed the next few words and could only try to catch up as they continued on.
“Dibé yázhí.”
“.”
“Neeshch’íí’.”
“Ná’áshjaa’.”
LAMB, MOUSE, NUT, OWL, I printed. By the time they stopped talking I had printed sixteen words. But I still didn’t know what this was all about. I glanced around the room. From the looks on the faces of my other platoon mates, they were all confused. Henry Bahe looked as if he was angry. Jimmy King, who was one of the hardest workers of all of us, was shaking his head.
Johnny Manuelito and John Benally went around the room collecting the papers. They looked quickly through the stack and then carefully placed them in a box at the front of the room.
“You have done well,” Johnny Manuelito said. “But you must learn to be perfect if you wish to become a code talker.”
Code talker. It was the first time I had ever heard that name, but it sounded good to me. Then our two Navajo instructors began to explain our duties to us. The more they said, the better it sounded. Our job was to learn a new top-secret code based on the Navajo language. We would also be trained to be expert in every form of communication used by the Marine Corps, from radios to Morse code. Using our code, we could send battlefield messages that no one but another Navajo code talker could unders
tand.
I realized right away that our job was a really important one. In order to win battles, Marines needed to communicate fast at long distances. In those days before computers, that meant using radio. However, anyone, including the Japanese, could listen to our radio messages. To keep messages secret, the Marines sent them in code. But the Japanese broke every code our American forces used. A new kind of code had to be created.
During World War One, our country had used other Indians, Cherokees and Chickasaws, to send messages in their own language to confuse the enemy. After the war, the Japanese had decided to be prepared for something like that if they had to fight America. They sent people to America to learn not only how to speak English fluently, but also to learn our American Indian languages. Navajo, though, had never been studied. It was one of the hardest of all American Indian languages to learn. Only we Navajos could speak it with complete fluency. Also, because there were so many of us, including hundreds of young Navajo men who had learned to speak English in the boarding schools—our language was chosen for making that unbreakable code.
Where did the idea of using Navajo come from? There was a white man named Philip Johnson who was the son of a white trader on the reservation and so he could speak “Trader Navajo.” He liked our people and had Navajo friends. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, he brought some of his Navajo friends to the Marines in San Diego to demonstrate how our language could be used to send messages.
An important Marine had already been thinking about making an Indian code. His name was Major General Clinton Vogel, commanding general of the amphibious division of the Pacific Task Force. He knew that the U.S. Army was already using Comanches in Europe to send messages in their own language. After hearing of Philip Johnson’s demonstration, General Vogel authorized the recruitment of that first class of twenty-nine Navajo Marines. Just like us, they were brought to Camp Elliott, where they were locked in this same classroom and told to develop an unbreakable code.
Those Navajos did it all by themselves. Some have said that Philip Johnson developed the code and taught it to the Navajos. That is not true. He did not know our sacred language well enough to do this. He was nowhere near Camp Elliott during the summer of 1942 when the code was being created by Navajos. Later on, Philip Johnson came to work at Camp Elliott. His job, with the rank of sergeant, was to be an administrator for the school, help things run well, and write reports. He could not speak the code and never taught it to anyone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Learning the Code
That first day in class, Johnny Manuelito emphasized to us how important our jobs as code talkers would be.
“The lives of many men,” he said, “will depend on your messages. You have to get it right the first time. Every time.”
Because of its great value, no one was ever to be told about the code. Nothing I wrote down in that room could ever be taken from the room. It all had to be kept stored in only one place: in my head. That was why everything put on the blackboards was quickly erased. Every scrap of paper we wrote on was collected at the end of each day. If I breathed a word about the very existence of the code to an outsider, even to another Navajo Marine who was not a code talker, I could be placed in the brig for the rest of the war.
I have heard it said that we Navajos carried code books with us. That is not so. Some code books were printed up, but they were kept closely guarded. The only two places in the whole world where they were used were our training areas at Pearl Harbor and Camp Elliott. The code went with us everywhere, but only in our memories.
“If you are captured in battle,” John Benally said, “die before telling the enemy anything about the code! Even if they beat you, even if bamboo splinters are shoved under your fingernails, you must keep quiet about our secret.”
I will never tell the enemy. I wrote those words down on my paper and underlined them twice.
John Benally’s warning did not frighten me. It made me proud that our sacred language was so important to America. It felt good to know that we were the only ones who could do this useful thing. We swore that we would protect the code with our lives, and we kept our word. I am not sure how many of us became Navajo code talkers during World War Two, but I know that it was close to four hundred men. While it remained classified, not one of us ever told about the code, not even to our families. We kept it secret throughout the war and long after.
How did we make the code work? In fact, grandchildren, it was not hard. First of all, we had to learn a new alphabet. For every letter in the English alphabet, a Navajo word was assigned. Wóláchíí’, or “Ant,” the very nickname that Hosteen Mitchell gave me, was the first alphabet word in our code. That coincidence seemed to me to be a sign that the way of code talking was something I was meant to do and that I would do well at it. Béésh Doott’izh, which is “zinc,” was the last.
One of our jobs of our second class of Navajo code talkers was to assign more Navajo words to the letters of the English alphabet that are used most often. That is because people who break codes can sometimes do so by hearing or seeing the same sound or symbol appearing many times. They call this “word frequency.” So we added seventeen more Navajo words for A, E, I, O, U, D, H, L, N, R, S, and T. The most commonly used of those letters got more than one new word. A became not just wóláchíí’ for “ant,” but also bilasáanaa for “apple” and tsénit for “axe.”
Because it would take far too long to spell out every word that we sent, we only used this alphabet for words that were not used a lot. On Sulphur Island, for example, we spelled out the mountain named Suribachi by sending the Navajo words for Sheep-Uncle-Ram-Ice-Bear-Ant-Cat-Horse-Itch. We used separate code words for things often mentioned in warfare.
There were so many words like that which I had to memorize. Hundreds of them. Tóó’tsoh, “whale,” was battleship. Gíní, “chicken hawk,” was dive bomber. Nímasii, “potato,” was grenade. So’ naaki, “two star,” was major general. Every night I went to bed in our barracks, whispering those words to myself. Each day I was tested in the classroom and taught more words. I did this week after week until the code became as much a part of me as my mouth, my eyes, and my ears. It was not easy, but I was proud to be doing something that only a Navajo could do.
They did try having some young white men learn our code. Major Shannon, another of the Marines who was recruiting Navajos, had been a Bureau of Indian Affairs School principal before he became a Marine. He was convinced that whatever a Navajo could do, a white man could do better. He found three young white men who were the sons of Indian traders. Major Shannon wrote a letter saying they spoke fluent Navajo and insisting they should immediately be made sergeants and given the job of telling the Navajo code talkers what to do. The Marine Corps, however, said those three white men had to go through basic training and start as privates. They would have to prove they were as good as they said. They were not. When it came to things like saying hello, counting from one to ten, or talking about buying coffee and sugar, they did pretty well. But they could not carry on a real conversation. They could not even pronounce many Navajo words right. They were quickly removed from code school and assigned to be ordinary Marines.
Camp Elliott was not all work. Once we began to master the code, we began to have fun. During the last two weeks we were taught such things as how to use and repair our signal equipment. All of our instructors were white Marines who were patient and friendly with us. Because we liked them, we began to play tricks on them and tease them. Even though the Morse code class he taught was so boring that it made us want to go to sleep, Corporal Radant was the teacher we liked best. So we drove him crazy.
What did we do to him? One of the things we did was to practice our weapons drills whenever we had a break in his class. The first rifles we had been issued were old Springfield .03s. Like good Marines, we took them with us to our Morse code classes—with bayonets fixed. Those bayonets were big knives with fourteen-inch-long blades. Whenever the smoking l
amp was lit—which meant anyone who wanted to take a break could do so—my friends and I would pick up our rifles and practice bayonet fighting with them. Ah, it was great fun. The fact that we nicked each other now and then and also completely destroyed those old Springfields while we were doing it made it even better. We whooped and hollered and made so much noise as we fenced with our rifles that Corporal Radant finally told us to do our bayonet practice outside. And just to let him know that we were really training hard, every now and then one of us would shove a bayonet through the wall of the tent near wherever he had taken refuge.
Sadly, we had to end our fencing matches when we were issued new M-1 rifles.
The armory sergeant looked down at me sternly as he collected what was left of my Springfield. “Begay,” he said, “you get even so much as a scratch on this here new M-1, a big chunk of cash is gonna be docked from your pay.”
However, we quickly came up with a new game to keep Corporal Radant’s life interesting. Instead of bayonet drill, we started doing hand-to-hand combat during our breaks. Because we had been told by our instructors that a Marine must always be ready to counter an attack, we included our friend Corporal Radant whenever we could. Any time he dared to step outside the tent for a smoke, he found himself wrestled to the ground by a pile of screaming Navajos.
At the end of our time with Corporal Radant he said that he had something he wanted to tell us.
“Because of you,” he said in a very serious voice, “I have lost my temper, my health, my good disposition, and my faith in my fellow man, some men in particular.”
He looked right at me. I looked back at him, widened my eyes, and then crossed them. Corporal Radant began to laugh. “I am really going to miss you Indians.”
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